My brother dropped his son at my place on Sunday and said, “Don’t call me every time he cries, Jules. I’m not driving back for teething.” Half an hour after he and his wife pulled out, my nephew shrieked when my hand slid under his knees. And somebody had painted over what was under his sleeper.
Trevon was seven months old, and his right leg wasn’t kicking.
Paolo and Kelsey had a minivan to test-drive across town.
I figured it was a tooth and put on a cooking show he was too little for.
Then the crying changed pitch.
He spat the bottle out. When I lifted his knees he screamed until his face went purple.
That right leg stayed where I’d set it.
I laid him on my bed and unsnapped his yellow sleeper.
His thigh smelled like coconut lotion, flat tan and smoother than a baby’s leg should be.
I dragged my thumb across it once.
It was FOUNDATION.
Under it was a bruise the size of my palm, nearly black in the middle.
Somebody had covered it before handing him to me.
I texted Paolo with shaking hands: Trevon’s hurt. Taking him to the hospital in Akron.
It flipped to SEEN.
Nothing came back.
I called three times. Kelsey’s rang out, and Paolo’s went to voicemail.
I stood squeezing his pacifier while Dr. Sayegh pressed along his leg.
“He needs X-rays, and somebody put makeup over this on purpose,” she said, looking at the nurse instead of me.
Eleven minutes later his femur was up on the screen, BROKEN CLEAN THROUGH.
I called Kelsey again, and a stranger picked up. “This is Investigator Sasha Kozlowski. Are you Trevon’s aunt? Stay where you are.”
In the hallway I found Paolo’s text from 11:40 last night: If anybody tries to take him, don’t let them.
I’d thought he meant a sitter.
Then the trauma doors swung open, and Kozlowski walked toward me with Kelsey’s phone in her hand.
“Juliana,” she said, “before you tell me anything about that bruise, you need to hear what your sister-in-law said.”
My phone buzzed with a new text from Paolo: DON’T TALK TO HER.
Kelsey’s phone
Kozlowski didn’t hand it to me. She held it at chest height with the screen toward herself and read off it.
“Your sister-in-law walked into the police station on Market Street at twelve-fifty,” she said. “She says you had Trevon Friday night. She says he came back to them crying and he hasn’t kicked that leg since. She says she put the makeup on this morning because she was scared of what would happen to you.”
I had his pacifier in one hand and my phone in the other. DON’T TALK TO HER was still lit up on it.
I turned my phone face down against my leg.
“She showed me this, too.” Kozlowski tipped the screen so I could see it. Kelsey’s call log. My name, my name, my name. “Twelve calls from you since Monday. She says you call when he cries because you can’t take it.”
“He’s teething,” I said.
“Okay.”
A man went past us pushing a cart with a wheel that squeaked on every turn. He was eating a granola bar with his free hand.
“I’m not arresting anybody tonight,” Kozlowski said. “Trevon’s on a hospital hold. Nobody in the family goes back there until I say so, and you’re family.”
“I’m the one who brought him in.”
“I know you did. That’s in my notes too.” She put Kelsey’s phone in her jacket and took out a spiral pad with a pen clipped to the wire. “So start with Friday. What time did you put him in the car seat?”
Mom’s Buick
I knew the time. I’d sent the video at 9:52.
But the thing that came into my head first, standing in that hallway with his pacifier going warm in my fist, was Mom’s Buick.
Paolo was sixteen and I was twelve. He backed her LeSabre into the brick mailbox at the end of our driveway on Brookside and put a dent in the back door you could have set a cantaloupe in. He came in through the garage white as paper and said, “Jules. Jules, please.”
So I told Mom I’d been sitting in the driver’s seat playing and knocked it out of park.
I was grounded for a month. She drove that Buick with the dent in it for six more years, and every time she parked it at church she’d say, “There’s Jules’s handiwork,” and Paolo would laugh with everybody else.
That’s how it went with us. Paolo was the one people liked. I was the one who fixed it. Mom said it at birthdays like she was giving a toast. “Jules is the strong one.”
When Trevon came, I became the sitter. Friday nights so they could go out, Sundays so they could do whatever Sundays were for. I didn’t charge them. I bought my own diapers so I wouldn’t have to ask.
And I called. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I had never had a baby scream at me for forty minutes straight, and I’d call Paolo to ask if he was supposed to get that red. Twelve times that week sounds about right.
Friday was a good night, though.
At ten to ten I had him on my bed in just his diaper, and he was doing what I called bicycle legs, both feet going like he was late for a bus. I filmed it. Eleven seconds. When their car pulled up I sent it to Kelsey, and she wrote back from the passenger seat, “he never kicks like that for me lol.”
She had the visor down when I carried him out. She always did her face in that little mirror, even at ten at night. A bottle with a gold cap, and she’d dab it on with her ring finger.
Paolo took the car seat from me and buckled it in himself. He was good at the buckles. Before Trevon was born he’d practiced on a stuffed dog and made me time him with my phone.
Then they drove off, and that was the last I saw of any of them until Sunday.
Kozlowski was waiting with the pen.
I held my phone out to her with the video already playing.
Family room B
She watched the eleven seconds twice with my phone in her own hand. Both legs. Bicycle legs. My bedspread with the pineapples on it. My voice saying, “Where you going, mister? Where you going?”
“Scroll up on Kelsey’s,” I said. “Friday, 9:52. She wrote back.”
“I saw it. ‘He never kicks like that for me.'” She handed my phone back. “So he’s fine at nine-fifty. And the last person with him, on your own video, is you.”
“I put him in the car. Paolo buckled him.”
“Kelsey says he started screaming before they got home.” She wrote something short. “I’m not saying I believe her. I’m saying that video doesn’t help you as much as you think it does.”
I asked Dr. Sayegh, when she came out, how old the break was. She looked at Kozlowski before she answered me, the way she’d looked at the nurse.
“Under a week,” she said. “On a baby that size I can’t do better than that.”
Friday was under a week.
Kozlowski put me in family room B, which had two couches, a box of tissues and a fake ficus with a sticker on the pot that said DONATED BY ROTARY. A TV in the corner showed a couple knocking down a kitchen wall with the sound off.
A caseworker came in a little after four. Her name was Isabella and she was from Summit County Children Services, and she had a laptop and a lanyard with a cartoon sun on it. She asked me the same questions Kozlowski had, in a different order.
“Where does he go tonight?” I said.
“He stays here tonight. After that, a relative who isn’t involved, or a foster home.”
“I’m a relative.”
“Right now you’re involved.” She didn’t stop typing. “Everybody’s involved.”
At 5:10 my mother called.
I hadn’t told her anything. I hadn’t had a chance to.
“Don’t you say one word to those people until you’ve talked to your brother,” she said. No hello. “Paolo’s getting you a lawyer. He’s beside himself.”
“Mom, somebody broke his leg.”
“I know what happened to his leg.” Something clattered on her end, like a pan going down hard on the stove. “You let Paolo handle it. That’s all I’m asking. You sit tight and let your brother handle it.”
She hung up before I could ask who had told her about the leg, or when.
Paolo called four minutes later. His voice was the one he used on cops when he got pulled over, low and friendly, a little tired.
“Jules. Listen to me. Kelsey’s not right. She hasn’t been right since he was born, okay? She panicked. I’m going to straighten it out.”
“She told them I did it.”
“I know. I know she did. I’m handling it.” He breathed for a second. “Did you give them your phone?”
“Kozlowski looked at a video on it.”
“Did she take it? Did she keep it?”
“No.”
“Okay. Okay, good. Don’t give it to them. They twist stuff. You know how they twist stuff.” Then, quieter, the way he’d said it in the garage when he was sixteen. “Promise me, Jules.”
The side pocket
Kozlowski let me go at seven. She said not to leave Summit County and held out her card, and I said I didn’t need it, I had the number. She almost smiled at that.
I drove home with the backpack of diapers on the passenger seat. Nobody at the hospital had asked for it. It had come in on my shoulder and gone out on it.
My bed still had the dent in the comforter where he’d been lying. The yellow sleeper was on the floor, inside out, the snaps open.
I sat down and unzipped the backpack because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands. Diapers. Wipes. Two clean bottles. A burp cloth with a duck on it that I’d bought him in March.
The side pocket had a CVS bag in it, folded down flat into a square.
Inside the bag was a bottle of liquid foundation. A black cap, not a gold one. Maybe a third of it gone. A tub of coconut lotion, sixteen ounces, the foil seal peeled off. And a box of infant pain reliever with the dropper missing.
The receipt was rolled around the bottle with a hair tie.
CVS, WEST MARKET ST. SUN. 8:14 AM.
LIQ FOUNDATION WARM BEIGE. COCONUT BODY LOTION 16OZ. INFANT ACETAMIN SUSP.
Under that, VISA ending in 4471. And under that the line CVS prints when you use your card. THANK YOU PAOLO. YOU SAVED $2.10.
8:14 in the morning. Three and a half hours before he stood in my doorway and told me not to call him every time Trevon cried.
I read it again. The time didn’t change.
Kelsey had told Kozlowski she put the makeup on this morning because she was scared for me. Kelsey’s makeup had a gold cap. This bottle was new, from the CVS three blocks from my brother’s house, on my brother’s card, before anybody had handed anybody to me.
I put the receipt in the front pocket of my hoodie.
Then I opened my texts and looked at the one from 11:40 again. If anybody tries to take him, don’t let them.
A sitter. I’d honestly thought he meant a sitter.
My doorbell rang at 9:15.
Nine-fifteen
Through the peephole it was Paolo, alone, in the gray Browns hoodie he’d had since high school. No Kelsey. No car I could see from there.
I opened the door with the chain on.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey. I’m not here to fight. Kelsey’s at her mom’s. I just need his stuff. The backpack. She’s going to need the bottles when they give him back.”
“They’re not giving him back tonight.”
“Tomorrow, then. Jules. Come on. Just the bag.”
I said hold on, and I shut the door, and I stood in my hallway with my forehead almost on it.
Then I did a thing I had never once done to him in my whole life. I took out my phone and called Kelsey’s number.
It rang twice. “Kozlowski.”
“It’s Juliana,” I said. “Paolo’s at my door. Please don’t say anything. Just listen.”
I put the phone in the front pocket of my hoodie with the screen against my stomach, next to the receipt. Then I took the chain off.
He came in fast, like he’d been leaning on the door. He looked at the bed first, at the sleeper on the floor. Then he saw the backpack on the comforter and went straight to it.
He didn’t open the main zipper. He went for the side pocket.
His hand went in and came out with nothing. He went back in again, deeper, tipping the whole bag over on its side, and a pack of wipes slid off the bed and hit the floor.
“Where’s the bag?” he said. “There was a CVS bag in here.”
“What was in it?”
“Nothing. Lotion. Kelsey’s stuff. She wants her stuff back.” He shook the backpack upside down. Two bottles fell out and rolled under the bed.
He looked at me with the empty bag still in his hands.
“Jules. Where’s the receipt?”
The comforter
I didn’t say anything. I’d promised him I wouldn’t give them my phone, and I hadn’t. It was in my pocket.
“You have it.” He dropped the bag. “You have it, don’t you. Did you show her? Did you show Kozlowski?”
“No.”
“Okay.” He put both hands on top of his head and walked to my window and back. “Okay. Then it’s fine. Then we’re fine. Just give it to me and it’s fine.”
“It’s lotion, Paolo.”
“They’ll make it into something. You know they will.” He was going faster now. “Jules, it was an accident. Okay? Saturday night. He would not stop. Two hours, he would not stop, and I went to change him and he’s kicking, he’s kicking me right in the chest, and I just held his legs. I held them down so I could get the diaper on. And something went. I felt it go in my hand.”
He waited for me to say something. I didn’t.
“Kelsey lost it. She wanted to drive him to the ER right then, in her pajamas. She had her keys in her hand.” He laughed, one breath through his nose. “I took them off her. And I texted you, so you’d know. If she shows up here to take him, you don’t let her. She was going to walk in there and tell them it was me.”
“It was you.”
“I held his LEGS, Jules.” He kicked the wipes across the floor and they hit the closet door. “You think I meant it? You think I’m some guy on the news? He’s my son.”
“So why’d you bring him here?”
He stopped walking.
“Because Mom said to.” He said it like it should have been obvious. “I called her at midnight. She said bring him to Jules in the morning. Jules finds it, Jules takes him in, and Jules had him Friday anyway. She said nobody would ever charge you with anything, look at you. She said you’d handle it like always.” He pointed at the window, at the street, at all of Akron. “She said, remember the car.”
I put my hand flat on the front of my hoodie.
“You were supposed to call me,” he said. “That’s all you had to do. You call, I come get him, we take him in together, he rolled off your bed. Easy. You call me about everything. Twelve times that week about nothing. Twelve times. And the one time it matters, you text me from the parking lot.”
“And Kelsey?”
“When you said hospital, I told her get in there first. Say Friday. Show them the calls.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “She didn’t want to. I told her it was you or me, and she’s got a kid to think about.”
He sat down on my bed, on the dent where Trevon had been, and looked up at me.
“Give me the receipt, Jules. Please. I’ll fix it. I’ll fix all of it.”
I took the phone out of my pocket. The screen said KELSEY, and under it a timer, 11:48, still counting.
He saw the name first. Then the timer.
“Paolo,” Kozlowski said, loud enough to fill my bedroom. “This is Investigator Sasha Kozlowski. There’s a patrol car pulling onto Crestview. Stay where you are.”
He looked at the phone and then at me.
“You promised,” he said. “You promised you wouldn’t give them your phone.”
I hadn’t. I was still holding it.
I took the receipt out of the other side of the pocket and set it on the comforter next to him, face up, where he could read his own name.
He didn’t touch it. He didn’t run, either. He just sat there with his hands between his knees, the way he used to sit on the garage step.
Somebody knocked twice on my front door, the way nobody in my family has ever knocked.
Sunday
Isabella’s county car pulled up at noon, five Sundays later.
She carried Trevon up my walk in his car seat. He had a cast from his belly down to both ankles, a soft blue one, and a hole cut out for the diaper. Somebody at the hospital had drawn a dinosaur on it in marker.
The second bedroom in my new place has a crib I bought off Marketplace for sixty dollars and nothing else yet. The lease is four hundred more a month than my old one. I took it the day the county said yes to kinship.
Kelsey changed her statement on the Monday. Paolo’s hearing is in January.
There’s a voicemail from my mother on my phone from three weeks ago. I listened to it once. I haven’t deleted it, and I haven’t called her back.
Isabella set the car seat down inside the door and unbuckled him herself.
“He’s had his bottle,” she said. “He’s a little fussy from the cast. If anything comes up, you call me. Anything. Even if he’s just crying.”
“I will,” I said.
She left, and I carried him to my bed and laid him down on the pineapples, and he looked at the ceiling fan like it owed him money.
His legs were in the cast, so he did bicycle arms instead, both fists going.
I got my phone out and filmed it.
“Where you going, mister?” I said. “Where you going?”
If you’ve been the strong one in your family for as long as you can remember, this one’s for you. Pass it to somebody who still is.
Family secrets and hard-won boundaries run through these stories, from the paperwork Dad made sure she never saw to the land a father tried to sell with his son in tow.
